CentOS - Mar 2012 - Odd thing with Realtek Ethernet card

Hi all, I swapped a Realtek 8139 100M Net Card for a Realtek 8169 Gig 
Net card in a Centos 5.6 system.

After reconfiguring the network settings I find that on boot up the 8169 
interface does not start. The startup script says something like "The 
8169 is not available..."

ifconfig -a shows a device with the right mac address called 
__tmpsomethingorother

I can get it going if I remod the r8169 driver and load it again. Then 
ifup eth1 works.

There's also a Marvell 88E8056 on the motherboard. /var/log/messages 
shows the 8169 as eth0 and the Marvell as eth1 but when the network is 
finally up they are the other way round. ifcfg-eth0 has the mac address 
of the Marvell in it and ifcfg-eth1 doesn't have a mac address in it.

Should I wipe those scripts and start again?

I've put a nasty bodge in rc.local for the moment to make the startup work.


Thanks

Ken

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--On Friday, March 16, 2012 07:41:18 PM +0000 Ken Smith <kens at
kensnet.org>
wrote:
> Hi all, I swapped a Realtek 8139 100M Net Card for a Realtek 8169 Gig 
> Net card in a Centos 5.6 system.
Although the 100M versions were passable, I found the GB versions
to be so flakey to be not worth it; I ripped them out and replaced
them with Intel cards, which have been solid.

In my case, I found that under load they would just "go away" ...
become unresponsive and need a power cycle to clear them.  (It
didn't appear to be an autoneg issue.)

In some cases, they didn't get recognised at boot, either, whereas
a subsequent reboot *might* make them come back.

Devin

On Fri, 2012-03-16 at 19:41 +0000, Ken Smith wrote:
> After reconfiguring the network settings I find that on boot up the 8169 
> interface does not start. The startup script says something like "The 
> 8169 is not available..."
> 
> ifconfig -a shows a device with the right mac address called 
> __tmpsomethingorother
The __tmpsomethingoroth names are used by udev to shuffle the device
names (like when you set HWADDR in the conf file). Looks like it saw
enough of the device to start the process but the device "disappeared"
before it could finish.  Had this happen with an onboard Gbit Realteak
NIC that was slowly dying.  Rebooting would sometimes get it to work.
After a week of mucking around with setting HWADRR and writing udev
rules, it eventually died completely.  A new card would have been a lot
cheaper than my time.

Kal